On the heels of announcing a big price hike for Disney+, Disney has revealed its plans to remove certain content from the streaming platform and scale back new shows in production in a realignment of the company’s streaming strategy, Deadline reports.
Disney’s Chief Financial Officer, Christine McCarthy, revealed the developments during the company’s post-earnings call, emphasizing the need to align content curation with corporate strategic changes. While she did not mention any specific shows that will leave Disney+, she stated that the company would complete a review and remove content in the third quarter of 2023.
Removing shows from its streaming service aligns with Disney’s plan to be more discerning in its content production. CEO Bob Iger referred to this approach as “getting much more surgical about what we make” during the call. Iger expressed concerns over spending substantial resources on producing and marketing content that didn’t yield significant subscriber numbers.
“When you make a lot of content, everything needs to be marketed. You’re spending a lot of money marketing things that are not going to have an impact on the bottom line, except negatively due to the marketing costs,” Iger explained. The CEO further emphasized the importance of theatrical films, especially tentpoles, as effective subscriber drivers while acknowledging the need to allocate marketing budgets more efficiently.
Iger cited upcoming projects such as Avatar, Little Mermaid, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Elemental, where Disney intends to focus marketing efforts and allocate resources away from programming that failed to drive subscriptions.
Source: Deadline
